How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
It would not matter if they killed you at once.
To be killed was what you expected.
But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same?
Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life?
Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.
When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.
Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?
Sorcery — the ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence. It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by torture and death. Augustine Nicholas relates that a poor peasant who had been accused of sorcery was put to the torture to compel a confession. After enduring a few gentle agonies the suffering simpleton admitted his guilt, but naïvely asked his tormentors if it were not possible to be a sorcerer without knowing it.